Enthusiastick Blog

So why do I have a WordPress blog when I’ve already got a perfectly good LiveJournal? That’s a good question… kind of. Let’s discard for the moment the notion that I don’t need to have any good reason for doing things other than “because I felt like it.” OK?

I am wary of over-compartmentalization. If I’m going to have more than one blog, I want to have a solid idea of what each one is for. They might not need actual mission statements (although those aren’t necessarily a bad idea), but ideally each blog should have a clear focus.

In the Fall of 2007 I started attending a weekly meet-up at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge called Story Games Boston. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for much of my adult life, but SGB broadened my horizons in ways I could never have imagined. There was, I discovered, an entire small press and indie games movement. A movement I learned about firsthand by meeting a number of the writers and game developers involved in it, several of whom participated in SGB (or were its founders.)

I had always considered my philosophy on gaming to be among the standard points of view. I liked systems well enough, but I was always more interested in the roleplaying than the games. I wanted to use games to tell stories; I made primary use of the Storyteller System to do just that. And when the system got in the way of story, well, that was life. It could be disregarded or house-ruled at will.

Little did I know that, up until my first contact with SGB, I dwelt in darkness and ignorance. The Storyteller System, it turns out, was not the end-all be-all of roleplay-driven games. It wasn’t even close. Here was a community of people at the Forge and Story-Games.com who looked at the status quo and were deeply unsatisfied. “Why should the system get in the way?” they asked. “Why shouldn’t everything in the system work in service of a good story?”

It was a revolutionary notion, to be sure. And just like the heroes of old, this fledgling community decided to be the change they wished to see in the world.

My perspective on the gaming world has changed radically in the past couple of years. All sorts of new notions and ideas brew and percolate in my head. Unfortunately, in my adult life, the constraints on my time are different, and my opportunities for gaming are significantly lesser than they once were.

I haven’t had a lot of success writing about these new ideas. I started a gaming quotes community over on LiveJournal, but it never really took off. So I’m going to give game-blogging a shot here at Enthusiastick. Maybe even put a few of the things I’ve designed down on paper. Share some actual play reports, all that funky jazz. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

But that’s at least one of the things this blog is for.

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